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Alan Highstone
}}Alan is a human cleric who lives in New Dalven on Custos, ammonite carrier of the nation of Vanius within the Flock. He has two wings which appear almost grafted from a silver dragon, one functional, the other crippled and stiff--an unusual and even alarming sight to others, despite his kind nature. He has kept largely to himself through his handful of years aboard the Flock, running his clinic near Clang Lane in New Dalven. Early Life Alan was born to a couple who lived in a modest cottage outside his hometown, Tam’s Crossing. He frequently saw his mother sewing, and he has strong memories of her holding him, though he can’t remember her face. His father would sit with him feeding chickens—none of which were ever slaughtered for a meal—and their cow—lifting Alan up sometimes onto the patient animal’s back—and he would take Alan for walks in the woods, spending time with him and supervising as he explored. Theirs was a quiet and nurturing home, and Alan remembers it with love. Alan remembers that his mother went into town on certain mornings, the same mornings when his father took him to an ancient shrine in the woods with a weathered statue of a woman wrought in stone—a place chosen because it had the right air about it, his father said, and a good patch of moss where they could sit—and tell him stories of ways a person could be good, occasionally teaching him to read from a book of stories about noble talking animals written in Common and brilliantly illustrated. With his father, there was never any praying, which Alan never thought to question, but which would lead him to guess later in life that his father had not been religious. The two returned to the cottage when it came time for lunch. When Alan’s mother came back, she would sit down and tell him what the symbols in a thick book said, teaching him to read about a woman called the Goddess who stood for what was fair and important in the world. When Alan was four, his family’s cottage caught fire. It started in a bad place and trapped Alan’s parents before they even realized the danger. Alan escaped, following what his parents had always told him to do if there was fire—running from the house to the road, leaving a sign he was all right, and then sprinting to the nearest farm, since that family had horses and a water spell for emergencies. Help did not arrive fast enough, however, and Alan was left an orphan. The Church Alan was taken in as a ward of the church and raised by the clergy. He was treated with compassion for his recent loss, and he found prayer very comforting, trusting easily in the idea that his mother’s good Goddess listened to him. Some parts of the church scriptures struck him as odd or too strict, but when it came to the doctrines of mercy and preserving life, his faith came natural and solid as his father speaking to him again, giving him a sense of purpose. He began studying medicine and healing alongside his chores and other lessons. In free hours, he often visited the shrine in the forest where he and his father had so often talked, praying there, for he recognized the stone statue as an early rendering of the Goddess, and he preferred the shrine’s gentler depiction of her—as opposed to the church, where she was painted primarily as crusader and judge. Wings When Alan was seven years old, he witnessed an argument between his church’s bishop and a furious red dragon. The dragon demanded treasure, power, recompense for its dead mate--no one remembers, now. But this thing it wanted badly, and the bishop would not provide. Just as the argument reached its fever pitch, Alan had the misfortune to catch the dragon's eye. It seized him in its claw and made an example of him, granting him two dull silver wings--wings like a dragon's, for dragons were to these people like demons--and then breaking one so thoroughly that the bones would only heal much later, and in a tangle, making it useless to Alan. All townsfolk had heard of this in stories, and in the teachings of the church--of how the race of dragons had once sought to corrupt humanity's form, and of how the few remaining dragons in the world still had that power to twist, to warp, to change. And these were the stories which Alan knew by heart. He grew up believing that his draconic wings were a reflection of a tainted life force, one which stood apart from what his Goddess had ordained, and even a weak soul. They set him apart from people who once accepted him. Alan struggled to deal with a sense of being pushed outside the flow of ordinary human life and relationships, and a new, pervasive loneliness that haunted him even in a crowd. Cataclysms Alan, with his mismatched dragon wings, cut an unlikely figure by the sides of the injured, the ill, and the dying, first in the church sanctuary and then in the grim infirmary which was set up outside it in the time known as the ending of that world, which came when Alan was seventeen. It was Alan’s great misfortune to see the end of his world approaching in the blood of the people he treated in the infirmary, and to hear it in their fevered words, before he ever experienced the calamities and the monsters firsthand. Destruction came to his hometown around midday in early summer, after a winter of war and a spring of hurricanes. Tales of monsters on the road had begun to draw nervous glances in taverns instead of laughter, especially when mangled bodies began to turn up at the crossroads just outside town. Still, no one then living there could have expected the fate that would befall them when creatures came out of the shadows into the broadness of daylight and razed the town. None survived save Alan, who had been visiting the ancient shrine in the wilds outside town at the time, drawn to that place which he associated with security and peace by a strange sense of worry and foreboding. When he returned, he forced himself to count the buildings that had burned, and the bodies. He wandered through the empty streets, filling a traveling pack by grabbing objects at random, and then left home behind with some vague notion of reaching his nation's capital. Alan traveled across an increasingly decimated landscape for an unknown time, though he estimates now it was a month. He has extreme difficulty speaking of his experiences during this time. They form the main source of his nightmares. When Alan finally reached his nation’s capital, he did not recognize it. He thought he had taken a wrong turn, and so ended up in that wide plain full of stone fragments and ash. He avoided considering that the two were one and the same by focusing upon a strange and varied sight: the landing parties of the Flock, the only life within that flat stretch of land. The Flock came very late in the world's destruction, and the volunteers’ search for survivors had largely been in vain thus far--not that this was surprising, given that they had found what had once been one of the world's largest cities in ruins. Alan joined them in their efforts and left with the Flock when it departed--when the world grew too unstable for the rescuers to remain. On The Flock Alan, three years after being rescued and currently age twenty, now runs a small clinic in one of Vanius's poorer sectors, near the neighborhood market and across the street from where a group of children from his own world live. He regards them as family, and they in turn treat him as more an older cousin than just a neighbor. They often bring him spare helpings of food, and he tends their cuts and bruises. He wishes he could do more to help them through hard times, but ironically he is often worse off financially than they are. Alan has recently begun to volunteer, helping directly with dying worlds’ evacuation. He made several unexpected friends on his first excursion whom he has since accompanied on further adventures. These include Algus Sturm, Em Adler, Aulkar Winterpeak, Lucien Spelldirge, and Sudigue'sharath. More recently, he has also met Raelynn Cresson and Sable Condilus. Shortly after his first excursion to the ground, Alan found that a gray dragon hatchling had followed him back up to the Flock, and he was forced to dispatch it, knocking the creature unconscious with a nonlethal mace strike. Afterward, he was approached by Cane, a red-haired man who was present to watch the fight, and learned that his mismatched dragon wings are literally cursed to draw dragons to attack him through the spells Antipathy and Sympathy. Though the news was not easy to take in, Alan finds it hard to see that conversation as completely negative, considering that it led him to meet Cane, who treated Alan with unprecedented kindness and respect. A few days later, after Alan and the party escaped destruction at the hands of the Fragment, Alan encountered Cane again in Megistus. Though Cane's actions there revealed that he possessed a harsher side, Alan could not shake the belief that Cane had to be a good person, and continued to seek his company, extending an open invitation for him to visit. Cane turned up the next morning and explained his involvement in Clades Diabolus in a private conversation with Alan. He offered to vouch for Alan within the organization and informed him of a final effort in Hackledown in three days' time. Alan, apparently granted new resolve to venture down again by the conversation, agreed to take Cane up on his offer and assist, ideally with members of the party. The excursion with Clades Diabolus took Alan and the others to the Hackledown Library and Foundry. Alan narrowly avoided death at the hand of a Drakodretch in the Library and helped rescue several refugees. One little girl among these refugees, Charlotte, was almost lost due to the trickery of a devil who masqueraded as a trustworthy teacher using a Ring of Disguise. After everyone was safe and the dust had settled, Alan briefly tried the artifact on and made his wings invisible. Of this effect, however, Alan remarked that he wouldn't be fooling anyone, least of all himself, and he gave the Ring to Cane. In the Foundry, the group faced even more desperate threats including Qual'stragor and the Kyara, but all the team members returned safely, rescued gnomish scientists in tow. Alan treated Barrel for a poisoned wound and proscribed follow-up medication, and he has been checking in regularly to make sure she makes a full recovery. Misc Quotes "I remember being surprised when I learned some people here think men are more important than women. Where I come from, it was the other way around. Nothing prevented a man from being a holy warrior or a judge, but most of them were women. I was probably considered a little feminine for knowing how to fight. At the same time, caring for others and healing like I do was more of a man's job." (Shrug.) "I never really saw the point in thinking about things like that. There is no men's work or women's work... There is only what we are called to do." The Wingplan (Alan's Schedule) 162AD Somahni 81: Hang with Soodles, visit Barrel 82: Last anticipated checkup for Barrel 83-89: Misc. clinic time, Flap family time including the Berry Festival 90: Attend night's Clades Diabolus meeting Category:Player Characters Category:Flock Category:Cycle One